Casualties include residents on the ground after aircraft heading to Beni went down near Goma’s airport.
At least 24 bodies were recovered after a small plane crashed in the eastern city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The plane, operated by local company Busy Bee, went down after shortly take-off, North Kivu Governor Carly Nzanzu Kasivita’s office said in a statement on Sunday.
The company said the 19-seater Dornier 228-200 had 16 passengers and two crew members on board. The aircraft was headed for the city of Beni, 350km (220 miles) north of Goma, when it went down.
Jean Paul Lumbulumbu, the vice president of North Kivu’s parliament, said 24 bodies had been recovered from the site, including those of several people hit by falling debris. A rescue worker, who asked not to be named, said 26 bodies were retrieved.
Images from the scene showed plumes of black smoke and flames from the burning plane as locals looked on. Rescue workers combed through the burned-out fuselage.
Goma airport official Richard Mangolopa said no survivors were expected from the disaster. The exact number of casualties on the plane and on the ground was not yet known.
Witnesses said the pilot was attempting to return the plane to the airport after they heard a loud sound that seemed to come from the engine, according to Al Jazeera’s Alain Uaykani, reporting Beni.
He said Busy Bee indicated the engine had just been changed on the plane.
“Something apparently has gone wrong with the new engine,” Uaykani said. “They could not save anyone from this plane because of the difficult situation with the location of the area.”
At the crash site in Goma’s Mapendo neighbourhood, residents threw water from buckets and cooking pots onto the smouldering wreckage. The rear section of the plane rested sideways, propped up by a wall, videos posted on social media showed.
Busy Bee, a recently established company, has three planes serving routes in the North Kivu province.
Air accidents are relatively frequent in the DRC because of lax safety standards and poor maintenance.
All of the country’s commercial carriers, including Busy Bee, are prohibited from operating in the European Union.
In October, a cargo plane also departing from the same airport crashed an hour after take-off, killing all eight passengers and crew.
In September 2017, an Antonov cargo plane chartered by the army crashed near the capital Kinshasa, killing all 12 people on board.
The country’s deadliest Antonov disaster was in January 1996 when an overloaded plane overshot the runway in Kinshasa and crashed into a popular market, killing hundreds on the ground.
